


Once More Rock Happily

by ArwenLune



Series: Rock Happy 'verse [17]
Category: Generation Kill, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: AU on my own AU... when will the madness end, Brad has definitely learned stuff, Friendship, Gen, Karen made me do this, Lee is a geek, Nate is a soft touch, Prompt Fill, Ray Got Everybody In Trouble, Team, random snippets from the Rock Happy universe, you too may prompt!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2017-12-18 09:35:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 16,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArwenLune/pseuds/ArwenLune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt fills! Because nothing about requesting Rock Happy prompts could possibly go wrong.</p><p>Seriously, random snippets of Rock Happy universe</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Soft Kitty, Warm Kitty

**Author's Note:**

> Karen made me do this. Karen rocks.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Lee Brittner finally gets a pet

"And is it your opinion, Sergeant, that Lieutenant Brittner was aware of the specific bonding traits of these animals?"

Colbert schooled his face into impassiveness, because he had wondered that. It had never been mentioned though, and she _had_ seemed genuinely surprised.

"No sir. She was merely answering the request from the locals to tend to a sick animal. She was not aware of the ramifications until we were all told about it."

"At which points she and Captain Avery tried to reverse this course of events."

"Yes, sir."

Well, mostly it had been the Captain. The LT had been surprised, that was no lie. He just wasn't about to claim she'd been dismayed.

He was still amused at her expression when the shaman had brought the screaming cub out of the hut and put it in Lee's arms, and it had quietened instantly. She'd subconsciously shifted its weight to support it better in her arms, and there'd been something soft in her eyes, something warm and rarely seen. 

"What happened then?"

"Itiu, the Shaman, said that once a cub had given you its trust, shirking the responsibility of its care would be inhuman. Would make us worse than Wraith. And that he was certain that the children of the Ancients would never contemplate such dishonour. Sir."

"Well..." Colonel Sheppard stopped writing and sighed. "Hard to argue with that."

"Sir." Colbert said neutrally.

"How do you see this impact your team, Colbert?"

"Well sir, we are all due some vacation time," he said, considering. "By the time we'd be back, the cub is probably old enough to be left for short missions."

"You don't see a problem with your teammate taking on this kind of responsibility?"

 

"Not really, sir. It will change some things, but it wouldn't any different if she'd twisted her ankle or something."

Sheppard frowned, and Colbert didn't want him to concentrate on the negative, so he followed with "And Itiu did say that if the LT proved her worth by bonding with the cub, she would get to share in their knowledge of the Ancients."

"Hmm. Yes. And that planet does have some interesting entries in the Ancient database..." Sheppard mused. "Thank you, sergeant. Dismissed."

 

Colbert swung by the mess hall before taking a long route to the zoology labs. He didn't want to be too obvious, just in case somebody was reporting this back to the Colonel.

As expected both the LT and Michèl were in the hastily set up quarantine suite with the cub. Judging by the cot in the corner, the LT had been here since they'd gotten back from their mission at 2700 hours.

"Can I go in?" he asked the lab assistant.

"You've already touched her, right?"

"Yeah, we all did." The Shaman had insisted that the whole team had to touch the cub. It would bond primarily with the LT, but it would know the others as family.

"Just put on a coverall then, or you'll have to change clothes when you come out."

 

"Hey Brad, talked to Sheppard?" Michèl greeted him. The team's social scientist was also in coverall. Lee Brittner was in a t-shirt and the BDU trousers she'd worn on the mission. She'd taken the cub straight to this room and hadn't left yet.

He showed the thermos of coffee and the box of pastries he'd gotten in the mess.

"Oh Gods, thank you," she sighed as he put it within easy reach. She had her feet up on a footstool and the cub, which was less than a day old and the size of a small housecat, nestled in the crook of her arm. "She's finally sleeping."

"They manage to make the right kind of milk?" They'd had to take some milk samples from the mother animal that had so unfortunately died while giving birth. Then a team of scientists had set to work to synthesise enough of it to feed the cub. The process had apparently taken most of the night.

"Yeah, she drank some at last."

Brad pulled up a chair and resisted the urge to reach out and scratch behind the small rounded ears. He'd grown up with cats. This wasn't exactly a cat, but...

"Does she have a name yet?"

"I don't even know what's going to happen to her yet," Lee said on a sigh. "What did the Colonel say?"

"He mostly wanted to know if you'd known that this would happen if you helped."

Michèl chuckled wryly.

"All the ones we had met had been bred in families just like we keep dogs. They were bonded with humans, but raised by their own mothers. Itiu said this sort of bonding is very rare, and only happens when a cub is orphaned. No way Lee _could_ have known."

"Yeah, but I know how this looks," she said wearily. "It's no secret I've been offered a cub before and was sad to refuse. And that half the city is saying I've finally managed to acquire a pet."

"Darren will come around, I am sure," Michèl said soothingly.


	2. #raygoteverybodyintrouble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What did he do?" Brad asked heavily, because Ray was usually perfectly happy to pull stunts with him, Nate, Mike or Poke around. That he'd waited until they were all offworld did not fill him with happy anticipation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sort of a fill to several prompts about Ray-in-Atlantis combined. Sorry, I just kind of went with the idea rather than sticking to them exactly. And I wanted to make this funny but apparently I can't not take everything to its logical conclusion in this universe. 
> 
> Named for my new favourite tag :-)

"Bloody hell. You heard about Person's latest stunt?"

Darren dropped into a seat opposite Brad, BDUs looking a little worse for wear for being breakfast time. His plate was loaded with the Atlantis version of a full English breakfast - scrambled eggs from powder, mushrooms from PX8-403, but proper bacon, hash browns and beans.

"I was surfing yesterday on PX4-362, and I crashed after." Crashed together with Dusty and hadn't come out of his quarters until this morning, which was how he'd not heard what was apparently big news. He wasn't about to share that.

"Huh. And Nate Fick and Gunny Wynn were with you, and Sergeant Espera is on leave. Fancy that," Darren said, considering. "What a coincidence."

"What did he do?" Brad asked heavily, because Ray was usually perfectly happy to pull stunts with him, Nate, Mike or Poke around. That he'd waited until they were all offworld did not fill him with happy anticipation.

Darren shook his head in disbelief. "He convinced pretty much all of Alpha company to dress as... let's call it a mix of wraith and zombies - it got creative - and storm the Cake."

Brad coughed, because his first reaction was laughter, and that would not go over well.

"The social science building where, I think you'll recall, work quite a few people who were here for the initial expedition," Michel said, putting his tray on the table and seating himself. Lee pulled out a seat on Brad's other side. Contrary to her usual morning demeanour, she looked awake and alert, like she'd been up for a while.

"Oh, shit," Brad summarised. Because he could vividly picture how that had gone. It may have started as a joke, but Marines did nothing half-heartedly, and a hundred screaming, dressed up men storming a building full of scientists with PTSD...

"Anybody get badly hurt?"

"Marines or scientists?" Lee asked dryly.

"Scientists? Actually, either, both?"

"Apart from a very nearly successfully executed suicide plan-"

Brad let his forehead thunk against the table and muttered  
"Oh that stupid whiskey-tango little hick.."

"We have some sprains and heavy bruising, and some people who needed a hefty dose of tranquilisers."

"And on the Jarhead side," Michel said with a sort of sharp, brittle cheer, "Some blunt force trauma, a couple of shallow stab wounds - I think most of the Marines realised things were serious before they got that close - and somebody who should be damn grateful that Dr Saintfort's reflex was to shoot at the feeding hand and not at the face."

Brad thunked his head against the table another few times, just in case it would help, and tried not to groan as he sat upright.

"So has he been drop-kicked through a wormhole yet?"

"Well, to his credit, he doesn't seem to have done much beyond planting the initial idea, and once he realised things were going to get out of hand he went to the nearest authority figure he could find for help to stop it." Darren said. "Captain Patel used the building-wide PA system to stand the Marines down."

"Meanwhile Person came to the field medic training session and got us over to the Cake," Lee added.

Brad could only imagine what the addition of the field medic team to the chaos had been like. Corpsmen were fiercely protective of their Marines, but downright fearsome when they felt they had to protect other people _from_ their Marines.   

"I think the reason he's still here is that he didn't try to hide that it had been his idea," Darren said soberly. "Though if it was up to Colonel Sheppard.."

"He is protective of us, has been since the beginning," Michel said in explanation.

"So what happens now?"

"You used to be his teamleader, what _should_ happen now?"

Punishment had always slid off Ray's back like water of a duck.

"I think he should be tasked with talking to the scientists about what they want to see as compensation... and then organising whatever that is," Brad said slowly. "He's smart - if you can get him to feel personally invested, then he'll do a good job of it."

"Pretty much what Tim Bryan said," Lee nodded. "Reminds me of when I was taking care of my siblings. The toddlers kept waking the babies, so I tasked the worst offender with making sure the babies could sleep. He became the noise police. Surprisingly effective."

"We will probably find that more satisfying than hearing he has to do 6000 press-ups, or some other ridiculous punishment," Michel said.

"I'll suggest it," Darren agreed.

  

This was how Ray Person ended up designing, implementing and championing a program that, despite his vehement protests, was entered into the annals of Atlantis as 'Sensitivity training for Marines'. .


	3. Can You Hear Me Now?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [self prompt: What's going on in the Pentagon during The Okinawa Mystery? Brad and Nate hang out. Something about Lee Brittner and Tim Bryan.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess a good thing about heartbreak is that it makes me want to dive headfirst into my own fictional world...

"Ma'am."

Brad watched Lee Brittner pace the waiting room, a sort of stiff discomfort to her body he normally never saw. He'd seen her gear up for a full-scale assault on a Wraith hive with less nerves than this.

The waiting room outside a Pentagon conference room seemed a poor place to suddenly show her nerves. Perhaps it was only visible to him because he'd spent so much time learning to read all the things she didn't say.

He was about as used to seeing her in dress blues as she was to wearing them - that was to say, not at all. It was a little disorienting, like seeing his normally jeans and t-shirt wearing sister all dressed up for her prom.

"Ma'am," he repeated just as she passed him again, and held out a powerbar. She accepted it without comment. 

Brad settled into a chair, knowing today would be a long day. He'd normally be standing at parade rest, making sure he looked the part of her personal security detail, but it had been barely a month since the Waronir mission. His leg wound had mostly healed, but he was still on light duty. Lee would only be giving him hell if he overtaxed himself by standing for no reason.

Her left arm was still in a sling - the wound had infected badly. The Pentagon had wanted to see her earlier, but she'd refused to leave Atlantis until it was clear Michèl Fournier was going to make it. Michèl was off the team - they were already talking to possible replacements - and possibly leaving Atlantis, but at least he was going to live. Small mercies.

 

"Hey Brad," Nate Fick said, entering the waiting room. He was in dress uniform, carrying a stack of folders. He was accompanied by Tim Bryan.

"Hello sir. I thought you weren't up for your grilling until 1400."

"I'm not, I just thought I'd come here to prepare."

Brad nodded, hiding his grin. No doubt Nate would have been more comfortable preparing in his hotel room, but Brad was pretty sure his old CO had wanted to give Bryan the opportunity to be there for Lee before her big hearing. Their relationship wasn't common knowledge, but nothing stayed hidden from Nate for long.

The corpsman had gone to Lee where she was staring unseeing at a painting, and while there was nothing inappropriate about their body language - he'd never seen them so much as hug - her spine seemed a little less rigid.

"You are such a soft touch," he said to Nate under his breath.

"Sometimes you just need to provide all available backup," Nate responded, not denying it.

The hearings were about the rescue mission on Waronir. Nate would be facing his own grilling later in the day, but the committee was spending most of its time on Captain Brittner, who'd been in charge of the rescue mission.

"Want to go for a drink tonight?" Nate said. "I want to give the musketeers the night off. We've been ear--stateside for two days and all they've seen is the hotel gym and Pentagon hallways"

"Bar next to the hotel looked good."

Plus there was SGC security staff for the hotel, so he'd actually be able to have a few drinks.

 

The day went.. well, it _went_ , Lee said, and Brad figured that was about the best that could be hoped for from these hearings. They stuck around for Nate's hearing, relegated to a breakroom because Ray and Garza started a poker game that got too loud for the waiting area. Lee spent the time looking over her files, occasionally posing a question about their perspective on the mission to the guys.

That evening Ray, Garza and Christopher headed out on the town. Garza, still limping slightly, wouldn't be returning to Atlantis with them. Originally he would have spent the last three months of his enlistment on the Daedalus. Since he was still on light duty and had missed the spaceship's tour, he would be working out the remaining two months in the Mountain. It was clear the goodbye wouldn't be happening without some Marine style partying, and Bryan, perhaps in the vague hope to keep them out of trouble, went along with them.

Brad and Nate talked Lee into coming along for a drink, but she returned to the hotel after one drink, claiming that with the medication she was still on she shouldn't be drinking anyway. Brad took the hint - she wasn't the only one still taking pills - and stuck with beer.

"How is it going, you think?" He asked Nate.

"The hearings? Hard to say." Nate slouched into the booth, looking entirely different from the man Brad had known in Iraq, and yet startlingly the same. "I get the feeling that Lee gets very different hearings than I do."

"Wouldn't surprise me," Brad said, remembering something Laura Cadman had told him. That what made men good soldiers was usually also what made them likable to other men. _'If a guy is direct and no-nonsense and speaks his mind, people want to have a beer with him. If a woman behaves the same she might be a good soldier, but she's a bitch.'_

The IOA had never been easy on Lee, and they might have finally allowed her promotion to Captain, that didn't mean the hearings couldn't be hellish. He thought it was the reason Captain Avery had insisted that Brad go along as her PSD, instead of the random Antihill Marines Woolsey had planned for.

"So hey, what are you planning for your leave?" he asked, taking a sip of his beer. Nate had his two weeks leave coming up after the last hearing, followed by a recruitment trip to Pendleton.

"Fly up to Boston, crash with my parents, catch up, go running along the riverbank, pretend I'm not freaked out by cars and shops and shit like that," Nate grinned, leaving out the bits they both knew and didn't need to say. _Pretend I'm not keenly aware that there are life-sucking space vampires just itching to find Earth and suck us all dry_.

"Then I'll fly down to Pendleton, see how Poke is doing--" Poke had only returned home the week before, so that made them both grin. Likely Poke was still within constant arm reach of his wife and daughter.

"He was talking about seeing if they could move to Colorado Springs," Brad said. Poke would be working in the Mountain for the next 5-month rotation. And if he ended up going back to Atlantis, his family would be close by whenever he had leave.

"And then I'm going to recruit some people," Nate said with satisfaction. He'd always stayed in touch with Captain Patterson, and Brad was pretty sure the man would be joining them in Atlantis soon, possibly even bringing Gunny Barrett along with him.

The conversation drifted into comfortable silence, just the both of them leaning back with a beer, enjoying the novelty of branded beer and a place where not everybody knew them.

"Think they're getting into trouble?" Nate finally asked, peeling at the label of his beer bottle.

"You _are_ aware that Ray Person is with them, right?"


	4. Bechdel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: 'Do Lee and Laura not talk much or is it just not shown?'

At first he'd just thought they didn't talk much.

Well, Lt. Cadman talked a whole lot, and Lt. Brittner not much at all, and that didn't seem much of a match. But SRE missions were too tense for chatting. And usually when Lt. Cadman was hanging out with the team, she chatted more with the Captain and Michèl. On the rare non-SRE mission she joined, she usually paired up with the Captain - never with Lt. Brittner.

He knew the two women spent time together in various training groups on Atlantis, but he hadn't been able to draw a better conclusion than that they got on okay, but weren't friends. Not in the way LT Brittner was friends with Dusty Mehra.

Then, so slowly that it had taken him months to notice, they'd begun to talk more, or at least spend more time together. And now they even walked together sometimes on a march, showing every sign of friendship.

Like so many times in Pegasus, he observed these things, but did not have context, could draw no conclusions.

At least not until more than a year later, when they were test-driving a new scientist after Michèl had officially resigned from the team. He was recovering from the injuries he'd sustained on Waronir, and it looked like he might be able to fulfil a research position on Atlantis. He would never go offworld again.

Dr Hairfield seemed competent enough in the field, was imminently qualified to mess with Ancient technology, and referred to Captains Brittner and Cadman as 'the girls'.

Perhaps Brad had learned to develop this sight, in his time on Atlantis. In spending time with the Semper Fu instructor, the Explosives Specialist, the Combat Rescue Officer, the Hull Integrity Specialist. Perhaps he'd learned to spot the brief clenching of Laura's jaw, the subtle ice in Lee's voice. Perhaps he'd learned to notice that Hairfield never spoke _to_ the women, only _about_ them.

Brad understood now that Laura and Lee had probably deliberately tried to establish themselves as individuals so he wouldn't do what Hairfield was doing now. It was all too subtle to verbalise, a pattern underlying all their behaviour - perhaps not even consciously. When Captain Avery later asked him what he thought of Dr Hairfield, his answer was "Sir, surely we can find a field-competent scientist who is also capable of valuing each member of our team."  


	5. "I am no man!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Lee Brittner and Laura Cadman, "I am no man!"  
> (Couldn't make that work, so went with a different quote)

She heard footsteps outside, and pushed her back against the wall, grasping her makeshift weapon tightly. The villagers had taken her weapons, but hadn't found the vicious little blade that hid in her boot. It was small, but she'd laced it to a stick. It would have to do.  
  
The heavy bar was lifted and the rough wooden door slowly swung inward.  
  
"Laura? Fuck it's dark here" a low voice said, and a light was switched on, pointing at the floor of the shack. It illuminated short, black hair standing up in messy spikes, and strong, pale features.  
  
"Lee! Fucking hell, I was expecting a sucker."  
  
Laura got to her feet, unspeakably relieved to see her teammate's face, faintly illuminated by the light on her P90.  
  
"Sorry to disappoint. The others are freeing your platoon across the clearing."  
  
"The indigs retreated a while ago, so the Wraith are probably inbound by now."  
  
"I know, we're tracking them. Narrow window. Are you okay?"  
  
"Banged up, but I can walk."  
  
"Here, brought you a gift."  
  
Lee Brittner fished something from a belt pouch and tossed it to Laura.  
  
"C4! You always know just how to cheer me up. Want me to set some charges here?"  
  
"Go ahead, it'll be a minute before the jumper swings by to pick us up. I'll stand watch."  
  
"Thanks. Man, you'd think we'd be able to spot those 'let's feed the visitors to the Wraith' situations before they happened by now."  
  
"Our previous contact was just after their last Wraith contact, so I'm not sure how we could have known. Did you finish that your work here before they locked you up?"  
  
"Yeah. We built the fuckers a dam to help with their crops and they'd feed us to the Wraith in thanks. Wish we could bomb that thing from the--what?"  
  
Lee's casual stance had gone alert.  
  
"They're here. On my mark, left and into the underbush."  
  
A few seconds later the two women crouched low on the leafy ground. Half a click away, on the other side of the clearing, a platoon of men were cramming themselves hastily into two jumpers. They could not observe this for more than a second, because at that moment two Wraith strode out of the forest and toward the shack Laura had been in. She tried not to shiver at the sight of them ripping off the bar and shoving in the door, at the memory of her back against the rough wooden wall and her improvised weapon in her hands. She had Lee's sidearm now, though it didn't have the kind of stopping power you really wanted with Wraith.  
  
She tapped a countdown on Lee's arm and hit her detonators when she estimated they'd be closest to her C4 charges.  
  
The shock of heat and fine debris rolled over them, blowing apart the bushes that had been providing their cover. A hoarse roar filled the air.  
  
"Shit."  
  
One of the Wraith was - well, very dead, but the other stood in the middle of the remains of the shack, his clothes burning and his hair scorched away. He was clearly injured, but they didn't go down easily - and now he had seen them.  
  
Lee rose to one knee, achoring her P90 against her shoulder. Her first volley sprayed across his chest, making his body jerk but not stopping his momentum. She followed up with a volley that started low in centre mass and went up. Laura was also firing now, both of them concentrating fire on the throat and, when the wraith got to ten metres away, the face.  
  
"Begone, foul dwimmerlaik," Lee said tonelessly as it finally fell.  
  
"You are SUCH a geek."


	6. Catch Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Lee Brittner hates being vulnerable. What was it like, the first time Brad had to take care of her?
> 
> setting: about three months into Brad's time on Atlantis

"I feel.. strange?"

It was phrased as a question, and Brad hoped he might be forgiven for the second it took for the words to really register. Then they slammed into his chest like a grenade.

LT Brittner had been walking in his trail, P90 cradled in her arms, comfortably climbing the narrow rocky trail with him. They were on their way to the summit of a small mountain to examine the altar they'd seen from the jumper. There was something emitting energy up there, but no space to land the aircraft. Michel had opted out the steep climb, and Captain Avery had stayed behind with him to talk to the villagers, so it was just the two of them.

Brad saw that she'd halted, and then, wobbling, aimed herself at the sheer rock wall to their left, leaning against it. Her face was pale, and she looked at him with wide eyes.

"Ma'am--" he was by her side in an instant, turning her collapse into a more controlled descent until she was sitting with her back against the rock wall. The moment he let go of her, she slumped to the side.

"Allergic reaction?" he asked urgently, running down a mental list. They hadn't eaten anything here apart from their own food and water. There could be something airborne but then he should be feeling it - plus they carried sensors that would have alerted them to radiation types and anything gaseous.

"F-falling.." she said in a small voice, squeezing her eyes shut and making a distressed sound. She was laying on her side now, pressing her back hard against the rock wall. The path was barely a metre wide here, with a steep drop right next to it. "V-v-vertigo," she brought out.

"Shit." he hit his comms button. "Captain, come in please."

_This is Avery, go ahead Colbert_

"We're nearly at the top, but the LT just collapsed. Vertigo. We need a jumper evac."

He looked down to where Brittner's uncoordinated hand thumped against the nose of his boot.

"No-no-nno," she murmured, gasping for breath. "Thing. Thing t-talking."

"One moment please, sir," he said into his radio. The Lieutenant was still weakly thumping her fist against his boot.

"There's a thing talking?" he asked.

"To my-my-my brain," she managed.

"Ancient device?" he guessed. "You think an Ancient device is causing this?"

She nodded, then moaned in distress at the motion.

"Sir, correction, don't come up here," he said into his radio. "LT says there's an Ancient device up here causing this." And the last thing they needed was a jumper pilot affected like this.

_Copy that. Calling an ATA-negative squad to get you guys back to the Gate. ETA to follow._

"Thank you, sir. Over and out."

Brad shifted his weight and looked back down the path. Some thirty metres back there was a recess in the rock wall - the path was wider there. They'd be able to wait for help there. Plus he had some vague hope that, as sudden as the symptoms had started, more distance from the device might help her.

"Sorry ma'am, this isn't going to be pleasant," he apologised.

As terrible as she obviously felt, he was heartened by her snort of amusement.

 

Normally he'd carry a wounded fellow Marine in a fireman's carry, but having her weight over his shoulders made for a far higher centre of balance than he was comfortable with on the narrow path. Not to mention that having her head hang down would probably make matters considerably worse.

He shouldered his rifle and crouched next to her, pulling her up to a sit, then pulled her arm over his shoulder. She reflexively clutched at the heavy fabric of his BDU jacket. He put his near arm across her back and took hold of her belt just over her hip.

"I'll steer us, you just try to support some weight, ma'am," he said. She made an affirmative sort of noise, and he straightened his legs, pulling her upright with him. Then, hearing her gulp, immediately helped her lean over far enough that when she was sick she missed her boots.

"We're just going back to where the path is wider, ma'am," he said, trying to make his voice sound all business. They'd only been working together a few months, and it had been far from smooth in the beginning. Lately they'd begun to build what he felt was a solid working relationship.

One thing he'd learned early on was that she _hated_ being vulnerable, and that anything resembling pity would just make that worse. He just hadn't expected his own protective instincts when faced with his LT in such clear distress.

He aimed them down the path, careful to keep her closely against the rock wall, with his own body between her and the drop. She had to stop a few more times to dryheave, and by the time they got to the wider section of the path, her face was wet with sweat and tears.

"OK ma'am, I'm going to help you sit," he said, very glad to get further away from the abyss to his left side. She wasn't so small that having her unbalanced weight against him didn't affect his own balance alarmingly.

He put her down, gave her water to rinse her mouth, and watched her curl into the foetal position.   

After a moment's consideration he decided it wasn't very warm, and wrapped a foil emergency blanket around her. Then, because she was very still and he was reminded of the medical course mantra 'Just because it presents like a familiar animal does not make it one,' he sat down next to her and kept her wrist cradled in his hand. Her skin was clammy and her pulse too rapid for comfort.

"Ma'am?"

She made a vaguely acknowledging sound.

"Are you stable? Getting worse? Getting better?"

"No...h-head.." he had to lean in close to hear her mumble.

"No head?"

"No--can't.." she gulped for air, "brain."

Brad sat back up, alarmed. He'd thought her trouble speaking was a simple side effect of the vertigo. If it was more..

"There will be a team here in about fifteen minutes," he said, trying to sound calm and matter of fact. What if the effect was degenerative and she was getting brain damage while he sat there? Should he try to get her further down the mountain, further away from the device? But the part was very narrow for the next hundred metres or so, too narrow to walk next to her as he'd just done. He'd have to carry her across his shoulders on a path barely wide enough for a goat.

 

_Colbert, sergeant Colbert, come in please_

"Colbert here. How far are you out?" he replied immediately.

 _We're minutes out_. Brad belatedly recognised Nate's voice. _Is there a good attachment point for a descender line where you are?_

"Yeah, some good rock to anchor on," he answered, looking around. Even strapped into a stretcher the path would be precarious, so he could see the sense in going straight down the mountain.

He could hear voices coming up the path now. Thank fuck they didn't have to wait much longer.

"They're almost here, ma'am," he told Brittner. Her face was dusty and tear-streaked. On an impulse he chose not to examine too closely, he dug a wetwipe from his cargo pocket and wiped her face clean. She squeezed her eyes shut as if that could make the whole situation go away.

 

"Hey Brad, hey Lee," Bryan marched right up to drop to his knees next to them, dropping his med bag in the dust.

Garza was right behind him, carrying a stretcher strapped to his back. Nate followed with a climbing gear bag. As soon as Garza had dropped the stretcher, he went to help the LT with finding a good anchor point.

"What has she said?" Bryan asked, gently rolling Brittner onto her back and peeling open her eyelids. She cringed away and then stilled, the motion apparently making her feel even worse.

"She said 'falling', that it was vertigo, that there was a 'thing talking to her brain' - the device, I've assumed, we know there's something up there - and later that she couldn't brain. She was really struggling then."

"Lee? Lee, gimme a status report," Bryan told her.

She opened her mouth, hesitated, and made an unintelligible noise.

"Aphasia? Hmm. OK, help me get her on the stretcher."

Between the two of them they got her onto the scoop stretcher and strapped in.

"I'm going down with her, Person is down there to receive, and from there it's only a few minutes to the jumper and the rest of your team."

"I'll follow down, if you've got a harness."

"Yeah, LT figured you'd want to."

They moved the stretcher into position, and Brittner made a panicked noise, eyes wide open and terrified. Bryan cursed and pulled something out of his medbag.  

"I take back every thought I've ever had about how cool it would be to be able to control the city with your mind," Bryan said, pushing up her sleeve. "Lee, I'm gonna give you a low dose of Diazepam, okay? The ride down is going to be unpleasant enough without freaking out."

If she had the kind of vertigo where you felt you were falling backward into a vortex, being lowered vertically while strapped into a stretcher probably wasn't going to be fun and games, no.

At that moment Nate was happy with the rigging, and Brad got into a climbing harness while Garza helped Bryan position himself and the stretcher.

She cried out when the stretcher was carefully lowered over the edge. Bryan's face hardened, and Brad thought he wasn't the only one who understood that she might prefer to be ignored in this situation, so that she could pretend it wasn't happening.

The descent wasn't fast, more a controlled walk down the rock wall. Once Ray had gotten them clear, Brad zipped down in a third of the time and helped carry the stretcher.

"Bloody hell," Avery just said as he got a look at Brittner. He started up the jumper as soon as they had loaded.

"We can feel the device from here," Michel said, hurriedly pushing aside crates to make space on the benches. "It feels like it is inviting us to come closer, so we dared go no further."

"It could be a trap?" Brad said, hiding his grimace. "Some fucked up thing to lure ATA-positive people closer and then.. incapacitate them?"

Vertigo kicking in on a narrow path next to a sheer drop - if it was designed to work that way, then the goal was to kill. He clenched a fist.

"It's possible. And I would say it was left behind from the time of the Ancients, but the locals were quite eager to mention the altar's existence to us, weren't they?"

"Fuckers," Bryan muttered under his breath. He was sitting next to the Lieutenant, holding her wrist.

"We're sending out a squad to check it out. Espera and Christopher are ready on the other side to fly the jumper back with reinforcements for Fick," Captain Avery said. "Let's get some ATA-negative people up there to see what is there to see."

He dialled the Gate, and after a moment to wait for confirmation, took the jumper through.

 

He'd hoped the effects would wear off as soon as they left the planet, but no such luck. By the end of the day though, the LT was sitting upright in her infirmary bed.

Hey expression shuttered when she saw him, and he was taken aback - weren't they past this now? - until he considered why.

"Hey, how are you?"

She vaguely gestured at her head with a 'what the fuck?' expression, and he concluded that the aphasia hadn't worn off yet. The scan had indicated it would do so over the next 24 hours, so it didn't look like there would be anything permanent from this little adventure.

She looked closed off, shamefaced almost.

"Hey now, Lee. I know for a fact that you've seen me in all kinds of awkward and compromising positions and have never been anything but professional about it," he said, watching her face.

Hell, she'd taken care of him when he'd been stunned on his very first mission. She'd been under huge pressure and outright unhappy he was there, and she'd still cared for him with brisk, comforting compassion. "Why are you expecting me to be different?"

It was frustrating that she still expected the worst of him, still expected him to use her vulnerability against her. But he'd already learned that getting angry about it wouldn't help.

She squeezed her eyes shut briefly, grimacing in what he thought might be acknowledgement. This really wasn't the best moment to have this conversation, when she couldn't answer.

Just when he was about to say so, she touched his hand, a brief, hard squeeze, and he understood that for the sort of wordless 'I'm sorry' and 'I'll do better' that he hadn't dared to hope for.

"Okay," he said, letting the glimpse of a smile show. "Hey, AR7 went up there with a load of scanning equipment and found all sorts of interesting..." 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompts: A little more about the interaction/dynamic we see in Okinawa Mystery / consequences of the walrus incident / something about adjustment problems when on Earth

"OK, hands up who has stood in a shop and gotten overwhelmed by all the options."

They all laughed as each of them put up their hand.

"Went into one of those fancy coffeeshops and couldn't pick out which pie to take," Garza grinned. "Just stood there with the girl staring at me."

"What did you end up taking?" Nate asked.

"A piece of each!"

"Naturally."

"To be fair, it was between the four of us."

"Fair enough, fair enough."

"Ma'am--Lee, you've been out there longest," Christopher said to Lee, who had curled up the corner of the booth, knees drawn up in front of her like her spine was made of rubber. "What's the hardest part to get used to when you're dirtside?"

They were in a separate room of the bar of the hotel where they were staying - about as secure as you could get outside the Mountain - and while they couldn't quite speak freely, they didn't need to be quite as circumspect as usually in public. It was the last day of the hearings, everything concluded about as well as could be hoped for. Tomorrow their little group would fall apart - some back to Atlantis, some on leave, and Garza gone permanently. Ray had demanded a communal bar session, and Brad and Nate had agreed.

Lee took a swig of her fancy Belgian beer, head tilted as she considered.

"Handshakes, I think."

They'd all been drilled from the beginning to never, ever offer to shake hands in Pegasus. Wraith fed with their right hand - extending your right hand to a stranger was considered an aggressive gesture.

"Oh yes, and dumb doors."

At the nonplussed looks she got, she elaborated.

"At home the doors I want to go through open for me. It's not conscious, the city just knows where I'm headed. Here automatic doors just open when you trigger the sensor. I keep finding myself mentally apologising for not going through them."

"Is it true that the city talks to you? Like, actually says something?" Ray asked, then turned to Christopher, "You ever get that?"

"I did get a lot of.. noise, when I first got there," he answered hesitantly. "Felt more like static, you know? Like being in between radio stations."

"It's never talking as in actual words," Lee said slowly. "More visual, or.. sensations. There's some kind of transference going on, like if the people are doing well, there's this sense of wellbeing. Sometimes it feels like the city is trying to be helpful, or needs me to pay attention to something. But I don't have the gene all that strong."

"Poke said it was all fairytales, that he never felt anything like that."

"He's ATA-induced though, isn't he?" Lee said. "If the people we know to have the strongest impression of the gene - Colonel Sheppard and General O'Neill - are a ten, then we don't know of anybody who is ATA induced above about a three. You get some of the functionality, but not much of the feeling."

"How strong are you?" Bryan asked, turning to her. Brad thought he was another beer away from leaning his arm on her drawn-up knees, and wondered if she would accept it in this company.

"Most people sit around a five, but we all have different strengths, and they develop over time. I'm maybe a six or a seven with passive listening, three or four with making machines do things. Miko Kusinagi is a whizz with city systems, but struggles with the weaponry. And so on."

"So this whole 'the city is a person' thing is bull, right?" Ray insisted.

"I don't know," Lee admitted. "I definitely think it's an entity with a form of consciousness. Michel says they could feel her welcoming them when the expedition first arrived. And Colonel Sheppard swears she has a sense of humour."

"Her. She," Nate pointed out with a smile.

"Blame the nautical lot in Ops/Tech. They decided early on that it's really just a very big, weird-shaped ship, and is therefore a 'she'."

"Seems reasonable," Brad shrugged. "Hey, just realised what I'm no longer used to. Waiting in the elevator. Feels like it takes forever."

"Muzak!" Ray cried out, grinning. "Oh yeah, I need to install muzak in the transporters."

"Only if you want to get stabbed in the face," Bryan groused.

A mild squabble broke out, and Brad was amused to see Nate and Lee lean back with the same quietly amused expression, letting it run its course.

 

"Another thing," Lee finally said, when it had run down. "Is that I don't send back my food, no matter how much the kitchen messed up, because I don't want to offend."

"Yeah, the cook might kill us," Brad agreed with a grin. he was pretty sure she'd never have sent her food back before Atlantis either, but that didn't need to be said out loud.

"I swear, to me the weirdest thing is just that there are all these people around who I don't know and who don't know me," Garza said.

" _Whom_ , dawg" Ray corrected.

"Fuck you."

Brad took a swig of his beer to cover his grin. It was hard to forget just how much they'd all changed over the past year.

 

Ray was Dr Zelenka's parttime assistant - could in fact be found elbow deep in Ancient technology whenever he wasn't on a mission or doing his radio program. Away from the anti-intellectual Marine Corps atmosphere he'd even come so far as to admit that he was thinking about an engineering degree. He still got into trouble - witness the fact that they'd had to lift him out of the NCIS brig just days before - but he mostly found the line of 'amusing Marine trouble' and didn't cross it.

Garza had grown up it less dramatic ways, the impressionable goofiness mostly worn away by the marvels and horrors of Pegasus. Brad wondered how on Earth you moved on from here, how you returned from Atlantis to build a normal life. He hoped Garza was going to manage it. At least he was getting two months in the Mountain to acclimatise, among people who at least knew about where he came from.

Christopher was one of the people who had worked out exactly as Brad had hoped. His calm, compassionate nature hadn't made him a great fit for Recon, where the constant posturing and alpha-male bullshit tended to bulldoze over the more introverted personalities. On a gate team, with the specific tasks that came with being an ATA-gene carrier and missions that were much more culturally sensitive, he'd become one of Nate's go-to guys.

Bryan was... well, Brad would say the man smiled at startlingly short intervals these days, and it wasn't the raw, gritted-teeth smile anymore either. It didn't hurt that he'd built a social life on Atlantis including a girlfriend - and it was still weird for Brad to think that was his teammate - but mostly it was the nature of the expedition. Atlantis finally gave him a chance to feel like he was helping to build something rather than helping to break it.

Brad wasn't unfamiliar with that feeling.

Nate.. well, Nate had worked out exactly as well as he'd hoped, satisfied both in a personal and a professional way by Atlantis in a way he hadn't been on Earth. He'd joined the Ethics Board and was active in the L Team and the Quiqil gaming league. In short, well in his way to becoming an Atlantean. Brad wouldn't be surprised if Nate made his career out of the place.

"Ma'am--Lee, are you drunk?"

Lee had tilted her head back against the wall of the booth, listening to the conversation with closed eyes and a slight smile. Bryan was leaning against her knees a little, not overtly coupley but still more than they'd usually let show in public.

"Nope."

"You sure?"

"Yep." She popped the p, smiling with her eyes still closed.

"'cause you look like your third beer just kicked in," Ray grinned. "It's okay, don't be embarrassed. We don't expect Zoomies to keep up."

A beer mat frisbeed over the table to hit him perfectly between the eyes. From anybody else that would have been cause for immediate retaliation, but either Ray wasn't quite forgetting that whole officer-enlisted gap, or he'd remembered that she'd pulled his ass out of the brig recently.

"Point taken," he conceded.

"I am just enjoying the realisation that tomorrow instead of spending hours being interrogated by the board, I get to go home," Lee smiled lazily.

Not even under duress would Brad confess that he felt a little twinge at hearing her put it that way. He hadn't really realised how much Atlantis had started to feel like home until he heard her say it.

"Leeaaaave!" Ray cheered. He, Christopher, Bryan and Garza had 36 hour passes for the weekend, before they would report to the Mountain for return to Atlantis and induction into the SGC, respectively.

 "Yeah, about that, guys," Nate said. "Since you've already had your party, I'm revoking your passes."

The men groaned in protest. Bryan did not look surprised - he'd obviously seen this coming.

"You'll travel to Colorado Springs with Lee and Brad, and head straight back to the city. Staff Sergeant Keawe is itching to get started with training together."

Keawe was taking over from Espera. If the guys thought they were going to have it easy with a Gate team newbie, they were mistaken.

"Transport is at 0800," Lee said, tipping her head upright to look at the guys. "Be there or be beamed out of your bed in your skivvies."

Nothing could embarrass a Marine, but the thought of appearing in front of Hermoid like that clearly wasn't appealing, because the guys shared a glance and then nodded.

 

"Yeah okay, we'll be there."

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ordering one of everything that looked appealing in a coffeeshop and then sharing them all is what I did together with some shipmates after we first got ashore after a 6 week ocean crossing :-)


	8. Soft Kitty, Warm Kitty - part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> part II of the storyline about Lee Brittner acquiring a pet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm in the middle of a house move and it's eating all my available brain.

The Captain, always concerned about the mission-readiness of his team, took his time, but did indeed come around. He was not the only one. Command decided to permit the LT to raise the cub; between the 'impeding duty' camp and the 'We'd all like a pet' camp and the 'Wild animals do not belong as pets' camp, it was a controversial decision. The LT moved to quarters large enough to hold an animal pen, and spent a lot of time in the North West quadrant park, which was fully enclosed.

She was off the team for regular missions, but it was hardly a holiday - she spent a lot of her time on updating training material and writing new syllabi.

While she was an important member of the team, nobody was irreplaceable in Atlantis; in Brittner's absence Captain Avery decided to give the Anthill Lieutenants the opportunity to gain experience on a gate team. What followed was a series of missions varying from comical to alarming; the team was unbalanced without the easy shorthand that had developed between the core members, and they struggled to adapt to the very differently experienced and much less culturally aware Marine Lieutenants.

Brad certainly gained a lot of understanding of why his own entry into the team, replacing Paul Warszawski, had been so difficult. It was also interesting to see how different their team was received on first contact missions - an all-male team was more intimidating to certain societies. Situations he thought might have been smoothed over with words suddenly turned into tense grandstanding and pointed display of weaponry. The team had made more retreats-under-threat in one month than in the six previous months together.

It wasn't that Lee herself necessarily changed the interaction, Michel explained, but that to many societies the presence of a woman signalled different intentions.

 

Meanwhile the cub, now named Ninja, grew from a fuzzy lump which screeched when not in physical contact with Lee, into a bumbling little thing with over-large paws that looked into the world through bleary, squinty eyes.

The team had taken to having lunch in the park, because Ninja was not allowed in the mess hall - or indeed in the control tower at all - which severely restricted Lee's movement. Together with the not insignificant resentment by some members of the expedition - who complained that she had gotten to keep her pet and got bigger accommodation to boot - Brad knew it wasn't a universally wonderful experience for her.

Four weeks in and she was covered in small scratches, had bags under her eyes and smiled more than he'd ever seen her do before. The lunch sessions in the park had grown into a sizeable circle which included most of AR7, the field medics and the ops/tech team.

The cub was too small to socialise, still spending the majority of its time in a sling against Lee's chest, though she was experimenting with letting other people feed it. Doc Aubert from Zoology and ops/tech's Kaylee were the most likely to be able to step in during an emergency. After a few sessions, they even managed to get more milk into the angry, spitting cub than on themselves and their surroundings.

 

Five weeks in and they went back to Inten, the planet where they'd acquired Ninja. The locals had asked them to return with updates, and Zoology had insisted that it was vital for the cub to see her own species as often as could be arranged.

That did mean a 45-minute jumper ride with a boisterous cub in a cargo area loaded with crates. The Inten people had given up access to the Stargate and trekked across their continent, and were eager to trade when they had contact with Atlantis.

Their mission included Doc Aubert from Zoology and Bravo Company's Captain Patel. The first had a legitimate excuse to attach himself to the mission, being responsible for the health of the cub.

Brad suspected that Captain Patel was looking to make the step from Company commander to leading a Gate team, and that was why he had started to come along to more culturally interesting missions. There wasn't space for a Major in the Rifle Companies, since they were lead by Captains. If Patel wanted to stay in Atlantis in the future, it was a step he needed to make.

 

"Ow!"

Lee shook out her hand and put the cub on the floor, ignore its protesting whine.

"She bit you?" Patel asked, looking over. The bite hadn't broken the skin. "That hardly looks like anything."

"We're teaching bite inhibition at the moment," Lee explained. "She needs to believe that we're very fragile, and that fun things like play and attention only happen when she's very gentle with us."

"That's why you won't let my Marines play with her?"

She nodded. "They'll roughhouse with her, and someday when she's hip-high and in a predatory mood, that is going to go horribly wrong. I don't want anybody to play chasing games with her either, she should never see people as physical playmates - or prey."

"That's pretty restrictive."

"And still there are plenty of big cat specialists on Earth who say that letting her live in contact with us at all once she's weaned is a bad idea," Dr Aubert said. "With tigers and other big cats you often see that it's all fine until they hit adolescence and the difference between a domesticated animal and an undomesticated one really starts to show."

"I read once that dogs behave more like wolf cubs than like adult wolves," Patel said, considering. "And that that's why they fit into our lives the way they do."

"Exactly. A wild animal will instinctively start to break away from the influence of its parental figures, because it's driven to be independent and seek a mate. That's when your sweet, cuddly tiger cub turns into a touchy, dangerous animal that ends up locked in the basement. There's good reason that most countries prohibit the keeping of big cats as pets."

"Will she do that?" Patel nodded at Ninja, who had given up trying to get Lee's attention and was now sniffing one of the crates with seeds for the Inten people.

"That's what I'm hoping to find out more about today," Lee said. "Far as I can tell they're sort of semi-domesticated. Bred selectively, but I don't know how many generations the Inten have been doing that, if they've selected for temperament or hunting ability. I want to get an idea of how she'll be as an adult, and how I would need to manage her."

 

And, Brad knew, if there was a possibility that once grown, Ninja could go live on Inten. Lee seemed to be enjoying what he was certain was her first extended downtime since she'd emancipated into the USAF at seventeen, but she was too career driven to give up her place on the team permanently.


	9. Bloody Ducky Scrubs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fill for 'Lee Brittner being angst-free (as far as we know) about killing in self defence, and Brad's reaction to that.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know, guys. This lacks focus more than a little bit, but there ya go. Set about five or six months into Brad's stay on Atlantis. Ducky scrubs, because ducky scrubs.

Brad spent most of the jumper ride studiously avoiding looking at her. The LT was standing in the cargo space, her back to the hatch, briefing the five corpsmen about the MEDCAP mission they were on. Like the corpsmen, she was not in mission gear but in scrubs. Hers had cartoon ducklings on them.

Brad had already been caught staring once, and been promised in an undertone of cheerful murder that if he gave her any shit about it, he would never get a normal bandage ever again - Disney princesses all the way. He was glad that AR7 - save for Doc Bryan - was riding in a separate jumper. There was no way he would have been able to keep a straight face when seeing Ray's reaction to the scrubs.

They were on their way to Delta Moon, which was used by Atlantis as a refugee camp for people displaced by the Wraith. It had a gate inside a cave system, but the moon orbited a planet with an easily accessible gate, and it was only about an hour by jumper.

The expedition policy was to avoid sending base medical personnel into the field unless it was for something that absolutely could not be done by field medics, and then only in carefully controlled circumstances. So a team of field medics would triage and examine the refugees, and only the necessary cases would be passed on to Dr Keller and her team.

Since few people in the Pegasus galaxy believed a warrior could possibly be a healer - he'd heard Lee lie often enough that her weapons were for show - all the corpsmen were in scrubs. Just not, well, ducky scrubs. Even so it was weird to see Doc Bryan on a mission without battle rattle and rifle, and from the looks of him, he wasn't really used to the idea himself, either.

Brad thought he was the only one boggling over the fact that his serious, utterly professional LT was delivering a mission brief in ducky scrubs, until he saw Doctor Michèl Fournier making a sneaky photo with his mission camera. The older man winked at him and turned back to face forward, where he was having a conversation with Captain Avery. The Doc was with them to learn more about the cultures the refugees had come from, and hopefully learn if they could find long term refuge with either their own, or any of the expedition's allies.

 

The team had brought quick-raise shelters, so that there were cloth-partition cubicles for the medics to work in. The marine they'd been paired with for security could be right outside, without losing privacy for the patient.

Ray Person and Doc Uusipaikka seemed to be having an excellent time on the far side of the row of cubicles, jokes flying.

Many of the refugees were on edge and still shellshocked from losing family, friends, houses, in some cases their entire planet. But they had accepted the organisation system of the Atlanteans, formed reasonably orderly queues at the medic with the speciality of their choice, and the medics had been able to work efficiently, which was what Brad really cared about.

 

By the end of the afternoon Lt. Brittner had finished with her queue of - mostly female - patients, and waded into the crowd to revisit some of the sickly babies she'd started the day with. Brad kept an eye on her while half listening to Poke picking Doc Fournier's brain about culture classification.

Everything was fine right up until the point where it wasn't, and there was a collective indrawn breath. People in Pegasus didn't scream - didn't want to draw attention to themselves - but the sudden tension crackled through the cave. Brad searched out the LT in the crowd, and -- FUCK -- there was a man holding a long knife to her throat. At this angle he presented a very small target, really only a shoulder and part of his head, but the distance was negligible for his M4, fifty metres was nothing--

" _Sergeant_ ," Captain Avery said sharply, before he could raise his rifle to take out the target. Brad breathed away the hyperfocus, the singular attention to his target, and saw the crowd of frightened refugees between him and his target. They were already on edge, and the armed Atlanteans in their midst had suddenly gone for their weapons. Shots fired, in this cave, would cause a mass panic, and that wasn't even considering the risk of ricochets.

Nate and Doc Diakhou were the only ones on the side where Lt. Brittner and her attacker were, though they were still a good twenty paces away. Nate was moving very slowly to get a better angle. Doc Diakhou was calmly shushing the crowd, voice low and steady.

The attacker was tall and rangy, face covered in a scruffy beard. He was using Lt. Brittner as a shield, controlling her with an arm around her throat, knife by her right ear. Brad bit down on his fury - with this man, with himself for not sticking closer to her, with failing to prevent this - and breathed out slow and steady. The man wasn't going to kill her right this moment, or she would be dead already. He wanted something, had to want something, and he needed her alive for leverage.

She knew it too; the LTs face was calm. She was speaking softly as the man edged them both backward.

 _They are going to the Gate_ , Michèl confirmed softly via radio. He was watching through a pair of binoculars, lipreading along. _He wants to be taken to Atlantis._

Lt. Brittner didn't resist movement, and they were about to disappear into the low passageway that led to the smaller cave that housed the Gate.

"Fuck homes, is she just gonna let him--"

"She's getting clear of the crowd," he ground out, because that had to be what was happening.  Medic or no, no sob story could compel her to let herself be taken, and revealing the location of Atlantis was so far out of the question it wasn't even on the table.

The moment the kidnapper took Lt. Brittner deep enough into the passageway to be out of sight, Nate took long, silent steps to get him back under shot. Brad moved too, recovering his shot. The narrow passage was backlit from the Gate cave though, and amidst the silhouettes he couldn't regain his target.

 _Lee, if he makes you dial, use Gate protocol Trick or Treat,_ Captain Avery instructed.

Trick or Treat was an IDC code that would let the Atlantis Gate Room know to immediately stun anybody coming through.  She'd get stunned too, but that was an acceptable consequence.

He watched the silhouettes move, Nate in front, though deliberately not blocking a shot, if one should be possible. Lt. Brittner and the attacker further back, walking backward, and--

Her hand went up, and there was a strangled yell. The next moment she whipped around, an underhanded grip on the long knife, and the momentum of her spin put enough force behind the motion to bury it into the man's torso up to the hilt.

Brad was already running through the crowd, trying not to shove his way through.

 

"Ma'am?"

He hadn't meant to sound quite so cautious, but she was just standing next to the fallen man, bloody knife still in her hand, and he didn't want to approach further for fear of startling her. Her face was impassive, and he had no idea of her state of mind. Even after half a year of missions together she could sometimes still be alien to him.

"What? Oh, I'm fine," she snapped to attention. She saw his stretched out hand, a silent request for the knife, and pulled up her eyebrows. "You got wipes on you?"

He blinked, and dug into his cargo pocket for a wetwipe, trading it for the knife.

Doc Diakhou had arrived and a moment later declared the attacker dead. Lt. Brittner didn't much react to that news. Brad was maybe a little disturbed.

He'd always thought there was something harsh about her, something uncompromising, and he had never been able to decide if he found it more admirable or more unsettling. As a medic he expected her to put human life first; to kill only under the direst of circumstances, and then  reluctantly and with regret. As a woman... quite frankly he expected her to be more bothered about it than she was or at least than she showed.

He knew she didn't enjoy taking lives - not like Trombley or some of the men he'd known in the Corps. But she didn't seem to have any regrets here either, looking down on the body dispassionately.

"Did you break his wrist?" Diakhou asked.

"Yes. Check his neck," she said after a moment, wiping blood from her hands. Her ducky scrubs were splattered with blood.

"Lee! Are you well?"

"I'm _fine_ ," she said to Michèl, a little more sharply than she normally spoke to the man. Then, to Doc Diakhou, "And?"

"I cannot be sure without scanner, but there seems to be a tracker," the man nodded.

"He was a runner?"

"Yes. And not the kind who keeps away from crowds, like Ronon," Lt. Brittner said. "The kind who was hoping to hand over the city to the Wraith."

"We need to move these people immediately," Nate said. He turned to go back into the main cave to Avery, gesturing for Doc Fournier to follow him. The older man turned away reluctantly, looking at Lt. Brittner with concern.

Brad saw Doc Bryan enter the passageway, and, knowing he was the only medic present she couldn't - or wouldn't - brush off, nodded his head at his LT.

"Ma'am, can I have a look at your neck?"

She went along into the light of the Gate cavern easily, letting him tend to the shallow cut at her neck and shoot her up with antibiotics. Brad dug a sterile plastic bag out of his pocket and put the bloody knife he was still holding into it. Dr Keller would want to test it if the LT ran into any health concerns. He handed it off to Doc Diakhou for safekeeping.

Diakhou was wrapping the body of the runner into an emergency blanket; it would need to be moved before they could get the refugees to the Gate, though Brad had no idea what they would do with the body.

 

The main cavern was still in a tense silence. A baby cried and was quickly hushed, and people looked at him covertly, like they weren't convinced he wouldn't open fire on them and didn't want to draw his attention.

Brad took a deep breath, slung his rifle strap over his shoulder, and made an effort downshift his body language. Captain Avery had given him this lesson once, after a tense mission; to 'stop stalking,' to relax his face, to let himself be human instead of Marine. To stroll through the crowd, meeting eyes and nodding at the people he recognised from the queue that morning. It had been interesting to discover that the Captain's easygoing demeanour was at least partly deliberate.

Avery was talking with Nate and Doc Fournier and two of the refugee leaders. He glanced over their heads at Brad with a questioning expression. _How is Lee?_ Because Michèl would already have told him she wasn't hurt, Brad pulled up one shoulder in a half shrug. Fucked if he knew.

"..would take us in, but I fear now that the runner could have planted trackers among us," one of the refugee leaders, a strong-faced woman with blue ink swirls on her arms was saying. "We would not wish to risk bringing the Wraith upon our allies."

"No, of course not, Michèl assured her.

"We have handheld scanners, but checking this many people is going to take hours," Avery mused. "And doesn't rule out contamination after the check.."

"Sir, the big scanner on base is somewhat mobile, is it not?" Nate said. "We could bring it here and set it up in the passageway to the Gate room and have people walk past, airport style. Once you're through, you don't go back."

"Sounds good," Avery nodded. "Update base and make it so. And ask for a QRF squad-" he glanced at Lt. Brittner, who'd just come up, in a borrowed clean scrub top and with a bandage taped to the side of her neck. "Lee, who is on Quick Response this week?"

"Two-Alpha, sir," she said immediately, because she had that kind of memory. "LT Fletcher."

"Ask for Gunny Stackhouse and a squad to come help us with crowd control."

Brad finally understood enough about Atlantis operations to follow what wasn't being said. The Quick Response Force marines would be sitting on standby in the Ready Room, playing poker and being bored. They tended to be eager for action, and this delicate situation was not one you just wanted to throw any bored and antsy squad into. By mentioning crowd control and asking for Gunny Stackhouse, a First Wave expedition member, the Captain ensured that he'd get a squad coming in with the right attitude.  

Nate's talent for organisation showed, and half an hour later Brad was walking through the crowd, calling for people to form into their groups of origine. The two largest groups had each picked an ally they thought would be willing to take them in - contact was being made at the moment. The others, smaller groups and a few singles who had probably been drifting for a while, would go to another planet the expedition used.

 

He bumped into Doc Bryan , who was instructing a young man about his wrist cast. They would check back on the two societies a lot of these people were going, but there was never any guarantee of finding the same people again.

They exchanged a nod once they were both free. Tim looked good, Brad thought; helping people and happy about it.

"How's Lee?" he asked. He hadn't seen much of his LT since the incident, but there'd been a medic briefing about the screening process. And.. well.. he knew they talked.

Tim shrugged. "Seems fine. Why?"

Brad grimaced a little.

"She seem a little _too_ 'fine' to you?"

"You expecting her not to be?"

"I was expecting this to.. bother her," he said, struggling to word his vague concern. "Having to kill a guy who didn't chose to be a runner."

And not just with a bullet from a distance, but up close and personal.

"Do _you_ care about the sob story or does it bother you that _she_ doesn't care?" Tim asked. Trust Doc Bryan to put his finger on the sore spot. In some ways, Brad couldn't forget that she was - had been - a nurse, and still expected her to react the way he'd expect a nurse to do.

He shrugged in acknowledgement, and went back to gently herding people into groups.

 

It was past 25:00 Atlantis Standard Time by the time the mission was wrapped up. The two big groups of refugees had gone to their respective allies, most of the others had gone to Foxtrot site. They had in fact found a couple more trackers - in clothing and bags, and as far as they could tell, planted there by the runner.

Only four people were needed to fly the two jumpers back to the orbital gate; the rest of them would exfil via the gate here. Lt. Brittner volunteered to fly one.

Brad considered offering, perhaps still stuck on how he should have been there to protect her and hadn't been and somehow wanting to make up for it by being there now. But he'd sat next to her while they'd both wolfed down an MRE about 23:00 AST, and as they swapped items (his Tabasco for her pound cake) she had made it more than clear that any problems with her response to the situation were his issues, not hers. Maybe tomorrow Dusty or Laura could help him get his head straight about it.

"Here, take Bryan," he said, shoving the man forward. "He can sort out the med kit during the flight."

Tim gave him a dirty look, but Brad just grinned. He knew there was something brewing between them, and the job Tim might not want came with a private hour of the company he definitely did want. Granted, everybody was exhausted, but Brad wasn't forgoing the opportunity to shove them at eachother in a perfectly legit way.

Lee shot him a very dry look as she turned to head into the jumper, still in the ducky scrub trousers. He wondered if he could order some more interesting scrub suits for her. Dinosaurs? Surely dino scrub suits existed? 


	10. Dino Scrubs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coda to Bloody Ducky Scrubs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've really enjoyed this shorty because it made me question myself on how *I* felt about whether Lee was or wasn't bothered about killing that runner. If she really wasn't, that makes me pretty uncomfortable. On the other hand, my characters don't have to make me comfortable... thought this was a fitting coda though.

"Hey Brad," Laura Cadman said, kicking out a chair for him. She was shuffling through a stack of forms and looked eager for the distraction.

"Morning." he set his late breakfast tray on the table.

"Hear you had some excitement yesterday?"

He nodded, cutting his sausages. Full English this morning - AR8, which was largely British, had claimed dominion over the galley for the breakfasts this week. He was not complaining.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, of course," he said, trying not to sound sharp.

She hummed in acknowledgement, going back to her paperwork.

Brad wolfed down his breakfast in silence, taking a deep breath as he laid down his cutlery.

"I should have been there."

"Been where?" Laura said absently, not looking up from the form she was reading.

"Been where Lee was when that guy grabbed her."

She looked up.

"It was my sole task for the day to keep her safe."

Laura nodded, and he was strangely glad she wasn't telling him it was okay. It wasn't okay.

"She shouldn't have had to..."

"She says she's fine."

"Do you believe that? That it really doesn't bother her?"

"Lee's pragmatic, and from what she's mentioned about Afghanistan it wasn't the first time she had to kill up close in self defence. I don't think she's tore up about it," Laura says. "Doesn't mean it doesn't _bother_ her."

"She acted like she just shook it off."

"Yeah, well, I imagine the more you expect her to be upset, the less she feels she can admit to being upset," Laura said dryly.

Oh.

 _Oh_.

"I... guess I feel guilty that I wasn't there to protect her," he admitted slowly. He really wished Lee would just chew him out for his mistake.

"Look, if you want to square with her, just offer yourself up as victim for her mountain rescue course or something. She'll get it."

Brad nodded, because she really would.

"I was thinking I'd order her scrubs with cartoon dinosaurs," he said after a long moment.

Laura snorted a surprised laugh.

"She wore the ducky scrubs, didn't she?"

"Yeah. You should have seen Ray's face."

She grinned big.

"It's some sort of dare from her ex. Apparently Fliss thought she's too serious."

They looked at each other for a long moment.

"Dino scrubs sound _awesome_."

He got up and gathered his tray.

"I'll ask my sister to look for Hello Kitty ones too."

Brad bumped her upheld fist with his own, and Laura grinned into her paperwork as he walked away.

 

 

 

 


	11. Atlantis trade headcanon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darklady asked some questions about trade. I couldn't really manage to make this fiction, but here you go:

_1) What sort of trade goods does Atlantis contribute to the wider gate economy? (Thinking more of things brought by the Daedellus rather than things from Maker Street.)_

**Official trade by the expedition:**

\- Medical care. Along with physical care (medics going places to care for people) there are a number of basic antibiotics, creams and cures for common ailments that the expedition trades; often for relatively low returns. It was Elizabeth Weir's policy to build an extensive network of friends and allies and to not exclude struggling communities and others who did not have immediate value to offer in return. Building goodwill in Pegasus was its own goal, so medical care is more about diplomacy than about trade. That's why in some cases it's more "We give you medical help in exchange for you being our friend/giving us interesting gate addresses/letting us study interesting things on your planet."

\- Salt. This is a mainstay trade good and is taken to markets and mostly traded for food supplies. The city produces salt crystals as byproduct of the drinkwater purification process, so it was a very happy day when, a couple of months into the expedition, Dr Hayashi realised how much of a precious commodity it was on most other planets.

\- Large glass jars. There aren't many planets in Pegasus where people can make glass, and preserving fruit and vegetables in glass is a skill the Atlanteans have been spreading. A lot of provisions from Earth now arrive in glass (by special request from Dr Weir) and the jars are cleaned and traded. Frequently they are traded with communities who grow fruit; Atlanteans supply the jars and the knowledge about preservation, and get jars of fruit in return. On markets across Pegasus you can trade for the familiar glass jars, and they last for years and years once they have received their protective woven baskets. 

\- Documentation. Photography, video and sound recording are virtually none-existent in Pegasus. A highly prized trade item is for a team of Atlaneans to come to a community to make photographs of the people, and to film and record their stories. They return carefully laminated photographs and - for big trades or special allies - a modified super-basic tablet which runs on solar energy and contains the video recordings. In a galaxy where few civilisations manage to maintain cultural continuity and the Wraith culls take indiscriminately, those visible memories are invaluable.

(To the surprise of the expedition, to many communities the knowledge that Atlantis retained a copy of the images and recordings has just as much value. No matter what happens, their memories will be preserved. Now that data is backed up to Earth, not even the destruction of Atlantis itself could change that.)

 

**Unofficial trade by expedition members:**

It is not permitted for expedition members to introduce Earth goods into Pegasus. Since it turned out this was a policy that could not be enforced, the unofficial official list (prepared by Drs Ingadottir, Hayashi and Whitmoyer and signed by Dr Weir and Major Sheppard) runs like this:

\- Absolutely no uniforms, uniform items, or any clothing that could let somebody impersonate Atlanteans.

\- No weapons of any kind, nor knowledge about such

\- No technology of any kind, nor knowledge about such

\- No Earth food of any kind (allergy danger!)

It turned out that almost everybody was thinking too complicated anyway, and the most popular items for trade on Pegasus markets are simple, well-known items of which the Earth version is an improvement over the Pegasus made versions.

\- Socks (most civilisations spin and have a variation on knitting, but few can make such finely knit and long-lasting socks as you can buy on Earth)  
\- needles and sewing thread. (Again, most civilisations have or buy bone needles and thread, but metal needles from Earth last longer and the thread is finer and stronger)  
\- Tooth brushes (somewhat less popular now that the expedition has started to promote dental hygiene and hand them out to allies by the box)

 

_2) What sort of things are *off the book* hot items in the internal trade economy. (Thinking of what the Daedalus crew brings to trade with the Atlantis crew)_

 - The latest movies, music and games  
\- Chocolate / sweets  
\- shower gels and other luxury products  
\- fancy coffee  
\- knitting yarn  
\- brewing yeast  
\- Tabasco sauce and other condiments not supplied by the galley  
\- Non-American food items for the non-American expedition members

 

_3) What sort of 'off planet' ( or even on planet) goods are traded from Atlantis back to Earth? (The SGA formally or the crews informally.)_

There is a very, very tight lid on anything going from Atlantis back to Earth - it is Expedition and SGC policy to allow no offworld items unless thoroughly screened. This is why Expedition members are is not allowed to send physical mail back to Earth - digital only, and people going on leave are subject to baggage searches.

 **The Expedition sends back to the SGC** , in order of quantity: data for studying, (digital) reports and paperwork, expedition members who break the code of conduct, control crystals, and very occasionally self-contained technology that's been thoroughly screened by the city.

 **Expedition members send to the SGC** : personal emails, reports and other digital paperwork, and video submissions of strange or humorous nature for Teal'c regular video compilation of intergalactic Stargate weirdness.  


	12. Who You Gonna Call?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is for Flexor, who wanted more about Ops/Tech and about Kay, and for the general 'show more of the first wave members' requests. I'm a bit cavalier about episode order - I only realised later that the Iratus bug situation happens in S2 so Bates wouldn't know about it, but whatever. 
> 
> I have a strange liking for Bates. I liked how he represented 'regular military' and how that weighed against Sheppard's insanity. I wish he'd stayed longer, I would have liked to see his development on Atlantis.

"Great, yes, call him back from his mission, so he can stand here being a condescending supergenius at me," he heard a sharp female voice. "This is actually what they brought me along for, Dau, so I'm just going to go ahead and get on with it."

Sergeant Bates rounded the corner and saw its owner sit on the edge of a floor hatch, tying back her mass of curls and getting ready to put on a diving mask. She had a belt with gear around her waist, but she was in a vest top and underwear, apparently not having bothered with a wetsuit in her haste.

"Wait, you're going down there like that?" He said, mentally trying to remember what needed to be evacuated if this section was in danger of flooding. "No oxygen?"

"We need a sitrep," she said shortly, putting on the mask. Bates knew her as the easygoing civilian in charge of Radio Atlantis - the woman with the unpronounceable name and the ABBA obsession. He'd seen her organise games and tinker on vague projects in the Maker Street workshops and wondered why the hell she had been deemed unmissable for the expedition. This was a new side. Then again, the space under the hatch was filling up with water with a force and speed that could have caused urgency in anyone.

The man next to her was Daugard, the Danish engineer who was nominally in charge of the ops/tech team. He looked at Bates with relief.

"Sergeant. We need the dive team geared up and the best pilot we're got available ready in a jumper," he said, clipping a long rope to his colleague's belt. "OK Marijke, good to go. If the water touches the roof, I'm hauling you back."

"Should be done before then, even at this flow rate," she retorted, and carefully let herself glide into the churning water. The surface was about a metre and a half under the hatch right now. Since the hull breach had happened less than ten minutes before and the space was three metres high, that did not bode well for this section of the city unless they could somehow fix the leak very, very fast. They were two levels under the waterline - if this entire section filled up with water, the city would begin to tilt and struggle to stay stable and afloat.

Bates was already on the radio to scramble the diver team. He took a hurried step closer, sick to his stomach at the sight of the woman's head disappearing under. Then she broke the surface a little to the side of the hatch, and slowly began to swim upstream.

Daugard was on the radio with the other ops/techies, requesting oxy lines and wet welding gear and suits and lights and monitoring equipment and God only knew what else was required for fixing a big breach in the hull of the city. He looked calmer than Bates felt - _the city was sinking_ , for fuck's sake.

"I'm not seeing her," he said, looking down the hatch. The churning surface had risen further, but he didn't see her head.

"She's probably underwater, using the magnet-grips on the deck to get closer," the engineer said absently. "We are going to need a hullplate loaded into the jumper, then get it right outside, and get it against the breach."

"How is it going to stay there?"

"We'll need to use the strongest electromagnets we have to stick it on. Once it's shielding the breach and cutting off the flow, we can begin welding plates on the inside. Once that is done, we weld the shield on permanently on the outside, but that is less urgent."

"OK. I'm going to arrange that and update Dr. Weir. She'll want to recall the Major."

"May I advise against bringing Dr. McKay down here?" Daugard said urgently. "His presence will not improve matters."

Bates grimaced. If AR-1 was recalled there was no way to keep McKay away from the crisis, even if he couldn't contribute anything but stress. And Bates was aware of the recent tension - read, underground guerrilla war - between McKay and ops/tech. The Doc had used his position to prioritise work to his personal quarters and been his usually personable self when called on it, and nobody from the ops/tech department had taken kindly to that. Communication between Ancient Tech and Ops/Tech was now relegated to Dr Zelenka, who seemed to get on with them much better.

It was a close-knit team: two civilians from the Nautical industry - the Dutch woman was a Hull Integrity Specialist who'd spent fourteen years working as part of a nautical salvage crew, and the Danish engineer, Daugard,  was a Nautical Safety specialist. They had been joined by a Bootsman from the Dutch Navy: Ouderijn, a submarine Air Filtration and Closed Systems expert. Their fourth was US Navy Petty Officer First Class Ouseti, the mechanical whizz.

As far as Bates knew, the choices for the 'Sgt Siler' department (According to the print on their coveralls they preferred 'Getting Shit Done department') had been motivated by the idea that nobody could improvise with whatever material was on hand like people who'd spent the majority of their career at sea. That one of them was a Hull Integrity specialist had been thanks to Dr Jackson's insistence that there might be some truth to the myths of a water-bound Atlantis.

Bates hoped they all lived long enough to tell Jackson that he'd been right. They might get blown up by the Genii, or more likely sucked dry by the Wraith, or killed by any one of the hundreds of creatively deadly things Pegasus had in store for them, but they probably wouldn't drown.

A hard clunk reverberated through the floor plates, and he looked down the hatch, the water was barely a hands width below the hatch now, Gods what if she--

A blonde head surfaced, and then - he would learn to pronounce her name one of these days, he really would - the woman was clinging to the side of the hatch, gasping for air. Bates let out his own breath, and reached down to pull her up.

"We have divers gearing up, hull plates getting loaded into a jumper, and Ous and Ouderijn are on their way with the welding gear," Daugard updated her.

 She coughed a few times, taking off her diving mask.  
"Don't bother loading hull plates," she said, breathing hard. "We need a plate the size of a jumper. Biggest we have, it'll never fit in there."

"Is the breach that big?" Bates asked in alarm.

"Right now it isn't," she paused to catch her breath, "there's a superstructure that's like a grate, and that looks to be holding. Two plates have blown out. But if we just use that size to patch, the hull around it isn't strong enough to support the weight, it'd blow straight out, probably take a a big chunk of the superstructure with it. We need a massive cover to spread the weight. "

"Crap," said Bates. "How the hell are we going to get a plate that big outside?"

"Clamp," Daugard said suddenly. "On the outside of a jumper ramp. I'm going to--Radek can surely--" he was already jogging off, talking into his radio.

The woman coughed a chuckle.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, just-" she waved a hand in a 'give me a moment' gesture and climbed to her feet. "Hey guys."

Two men pushed a cart loaded with diving gear around the corner. Ouseti and Ouderijn, the first a short, wiry man of Caribbean descent, the second tall and lean with an angular face. He tossed her a heavy-duty wetsuit, and Bates listened to radio updates while she struggled into it.

 

Colonel Sumner had resisted the idea of bringing more civilians than absolutely necessary - clearly some of the scientists were unique, but surely US military personnel could be found to round out the ops/tech team? Bates had silently agreed.

Dr Weir had been adamant that they would need all sorts of personalities to form a community for any length of time, and that diversity in gender and nationality had its value. Bates had to admit privately that the choice had worked out well. The high pressure and isolation of life on Atlantis caused cabin fever in his Marines, but these people, used to living at sea, didn't seem to suffer from it nearly as much.

Despite their workload they often had energy and motivation to organise social activities, and no direct chain of command to stop them from instituting spontaneous games of The Gate Room Floor Is Lava or Corridor Soccer. Things like that seemed to have a positive influence on the sanity level of the expedition.

The woman had started the Radio Atlantis broadcasts in the second week in the city, and the soft background music had helped make the place feel.. well, if not like home, then like a place they could maybe live rather than merely shelter in.

It was mostly music, but there were some news-from-the-Gateroom updates, and Ouderijn did a wildly popular daily segment called 'Explain It Like I'm Five,' in which he talked to scientists about their work.

Bates vividly remembered the argument about the small packing crate of material the ops/tech department had insisted they needed. The space had been hotly contested, and why did they need screenprint materials anyway? He had been baffled Dr Weir had signed off on it.

Then the posters and t-shirts had started to appear. 'Visit Hoff and enjoy high quality health care' and 'Enjoy the traditional Genii hospitality!' with a picture of a farm. The most famous one was the simple 'It's a bug's life' print t-shirt that Major Sheppard had received days after the Iratus incident. Bates had been utterly baffled that the man had not only not disciplined the techs, but that he'd worn the t-shirt for days.

(Lt. Ford had later explained that the Major seemed relieved - that the t-shirt signalled that the time for fear of him was over, that they were now in the stage where there could be jokes)

 

Daugard was overseeing the external side of the operation, and would be on board the jumper when they placed the external hull plate. Bates had arranged five Marine divers to help with the placing the electromagnets that would keep it in place. Ouderijn was just explaining to them exactly how to place and operate them.

Down at the rapidly flooding level Kay and Ouseti were setting up welding gear. Marines were carrying in the smaller sized hull plates that would be used on the inside.

One Marine was down there gearing up in the last wetsuit they had - Bates was cursing that they didn't have more, but six had already seemed excessive on the gear list before they left, especially since the Ops/Tech team had their own, bringing the total to ten.

They would need more hands down there to get and keep the heavy hull plates into place so they could be welded. He was keeping three Marines on standby to jump in and help anyway. Kay had gone without wetsuit and had said five minutes was the max amount of time anybody could function in the water temperature, but they'd just have to work fast and keep relieving each other. They didn't have any more oxygen tanks either, but Ouseti had suggested laying out an oxygen hose they could use.

Kay had looked mildly horrified and muttered something about the sheer amount of safety regulations they were breaking here, and then nodded. She was pragmatic enough to know there was no choice here.

Bates coordinated, trying to keep as much of the grunt work out of the team's hands so they could arrange the matters his Marines weren't trained for, and kept Dr Weir up to date.

 

Five minutes later the Gate room radioed that the Major had returned. It was a relief, because he really was by far the best person to be flying the jumper for the complicated manoeuvre necessary to get the hull plate into position.

"Dr Weir, can I suggest that Dr McKay occupy himself with monitoring the jumper?" he radioed.

"Ideally from the control room?" she replied, sounding amused. Dr Weir was the one who had been trying to broker a peace between the scientist and the techs, and she was well aware that down in the flooded basement was the last place the man needed to be now.

(It wasn't just the conflict with the team; Bates had witnessed the first time McKay had met Kay, and the Doc had managed to hit on her, insult her, condescend her and dismiss her all in the space of 30 seconds. Bates wouldn't exactly call himself a sensitive man, but he'd cringed in sympathetic embarrassment.)

 

It was another five minutes or so before the jumper was ready to go, the hull plate attached in some kind of enormous hydraulic clamp system Zelenka and Daugard had magicked out of thin air.

Kay looked up from the welding gear she was setting up, and grabbed her radio.

"Here's a quick safety briefing for the guys who will be going into the water outside."

"Go ahead, we're listening," it came back from Major Sheppard.

"Guys, do you know those things they use in the galley to cut an entire potato into chips?" she paused to let the image form. "You get sucked into that breach, and that's pretty much what'll happen. Use your bloody tethers."

There was a long moment of silence. Bates thought he heard Sheppard snort a quiet breath in amusement.

"Kay, you give the _best_ safety lectures," the Major said dryly.

"I do try. We're ready down here - see you when you're back."


	13. Backup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes Brad needs all available backup, and he doesn't need to ask.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's not even a prompt. There's just a happy thought that Brad gets to have people like this in his life now

"Really, we're doing this?"

"Lee, you know he's been twitchy about it since he agreed to it, right?"

"Yeah, I noticed. But.. look, is he even going to want me there when he sees his ex? I think it'll just be weird. You'll already be there."

"You've got his back, right? Not just on missions?"

"Dusty, you _know_ that I do."

"I think this is going to be one of those times he'll want that."

"I don't even understand why he wants to see them. If my partner had run off with my best friend I wouldn't feel obliged to even acknowledge their existence ever again. Let alone spend Earth-leave time having dinner with them."

"I think she asked and he still has that reflex that says he needs to be a good sport about the whole thing, so he agreed. Look, you'll be at the promotion ceremony anyway. All I'm saying is, if he asks you along for dinner afterward, he's not doing it to be polite."

"OK. If he wants me there, I'll be there."

"Thank you."

"So… do you want to be the intimidating one or do I get to have that pleasure?"

"…suddenly, I'm looking forward to this."


	14. Introverts Anonymous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had this snippet sitting around, and it's one of those point-along-the-way-of-Brad-feeling-like-Team moments. Because I think maybe that started through being silent

Captain Avery said that they'd gotten this mission because he hadn't been around to wriggle out of it like all the other team leaders had done.

Michèl said that it was because their combined skills made them uniquely skilled for this mission.

Lt. Cadman said that she had corrected Dr McKay the last time he'd tried to get involved in her PhD progress, which had really pissed him off, and that was why they'd been stuck with the mission.

Lt. Brittner said that Colonel Carter knew that they were the team least likely to murder each other during a seventeen hour long jumper flight.

Brad thought it was probably a mix of all of these things, plus the fact that AR4 was the only team with three pilots, and could more easily manage the flying hours than other teams.

They'd all started in the cockpit, talking about the mission. An ally they couldn't dial into anymore was reason to go check by jumper, even if it was an inconvenient mission. The next Daedalus visit was months away, and command hadn't wanted to wait. The team had passed an hour with speculation and memories of earlier contact with these people. Then another hour or so with silly games Lt. Cadman insisted had to be played on a road trip. Lt. Brittner had replaced Captain Avery as pilot so the latter could join the poker game that had started then

Brad had been smoked by Lt. Cadman, and really, after five months he shouldn't still be falling for her innocent expressions. At least he had the excuse of not knowing her as well as the others did - though they spent social time as a team in the city, she was usually only along on missions if they were responding to an emergency. Plus, her usual opponent was Miko, whose poker face was reknown in the city. At least the others had lost too, now owing Cadman first pick from their MRE snacks.

After three games Michèl had taken over the pilot seat, and Lt. Brittner had announced that she was 'peopled out' and was going to be antisocial in the back, with the cargo door shut. Brad had stayed in the cockpit until the Captain had said,

"Go on, Lee won't mind-" with a wave toward the back.

And the thing was that he did know that. He knew that he and the LT had the 'being apart together' thing down to a fine art and that he was welcome to claim some space in the back. They sometimes walked together in comfortable silence, far enough ahead of the others to stay out of the conversation.

He'd never been on a team where people _got_ his need for alone time, let alone were willing to accommodate it. AR4 seemed to instinctively shape itself around its members respective need, or the lack thereof, for company. It wasn't safe to go off and truly be alone on missions, but it was okay to declare that you were going to have some quiet time and sit away from the others a little.

The Captain called it 'Going to an Introverts Anonymous meeting.'

Brad was used to being hounded and deliberately bugged when he wanted some quiet to recharge, so the marvel of how accepted and easy this was still hadn't worn off.

He went into the back and stretched out on the empty bench, intending to take a nap, but instead just staring at the gear boxes at the ceiling and enjoying the quiet. He could hear the occasional bout of laughter through the cargo doors, but it was soft, and here was just the hum of the jumper and the LTs breathing and the occasional sound of papers being shuffled.

Lt. Brittner was sitting on the bench opposite him, boots kicked off and with her knees drawn up. She had brought along her tablet and a stack of backlogged paperwork, apparently having hoped that boredom would drive her to do it. Well, a 17 hour jumper right might do that. 

She was close enough that if he reached out his hand he could poke her - not that he would, because while they'd grown to be comfortable, perhaps even friendly teammates, she was still an officer... and also, she'd just sharpened the pencil she was working with.

Brad closed his eyes and smiled to himself. This sure as hell beat crawling under a humvee while half a platoon gawked at him and loudly speculated what the hell was wrong with him.

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: prompting is closed for the moment. I'm not doing too well with following up on the ones I already have, so it seems unfair to just keep getting more that probably won't get filled. If you have direct questions about something in the Rock Happy verse I'll probably still answer those. 
> 
> ~~So in an effort to get myself back to writing, I am taking Rock Happy prompts! If you want to give one, by all means post it in the comments.~~  
>  \- Please make it Rock Happy specific - featuring the OCs or other people or situations as I've created them. I'm okay involving the canon main characters (though I don't really enjoy writing Rodney) but I am looking for something that fits into my universe  
> \- No pairings apart from what already exists in Rock Happy  
> \- I will try write a drabble or shorty about it. If I really struggle with your prompt it might end up simply being an explanation rather than fiction. Feel free to prompt more than once! No promise I will get to all of them, but it's always inspiring when other people walk around in my fictional universe and poke things and have questions and want to see things.  
> \- Fun prompts have characters and/or situation/plot point, and maybe a quote to centre a scene around. Questions about sidestreets I hit in the story are fun too.


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